Cheat Sheets

To most Americans, the flag of the United States of America is more than just a piece of cloth. The Stars and Stripes represents American freedom, democracy, and sacrifice and should be treated with respect[more…]

Father's Day, celebrated in the United States on the third Sunday of June, got a jump start from the formation of Mother's Day. Credit for beginning Father's Day celebrations is given to Sonora Smart Dodd[more…]

Did women first get the right to vote in the United States as a result of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920? Yes and no. The Nineteenth Amendment gave the right to vote to all women[more…]

Labor Day, observed on the first Monday in September in the United States, is considered by many to mark the end of summer. Although it is ostensibly meant to celebrate the civic and economic contributions[more…]

The American Civil War encompasses a vast number of political, social, and military acts. This timeline highlights crucial events that shaped the beginning and outcome of the Civil War between the Union[more…]

Historians believe that the Underground Railroad may have originated with the Quakers in the late 1780s, so it’s no surprise that Quakers comprised a large portion of white Underground Railroad supporters[more…]

No one planned on Arkansas serving as a major desegregation battleground. The Little Rock School Board issued a statement that it would comply with the Supreme Court decision and adopted an integration[more…]

Sit-ins weren’t a new civil rights technique. But they in 1960 they helped energize the civil rights movement. Although a passive technique in nature, sit-ins caused real change to occur. The impact sit-ins[more…]

The Civil Rights Act had been struggling in legislation under Kennedy's presidency. Ironically, Kennedy’s assassination strengthened the proposed civil rights bill. Prior to his death, any civil rights[more…]

On July 22, Lincoln surprised his cabinet members by reading a preliminary draft of his executive order for emancipation. Only two cabinet members fully endorsed the Proclamation, and one cabinet member[more…]

Contrary to popular belief, W.E.B. Du Bois didn’t conceive the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Instead, the NAACP began with a group of white people spurred to action[more…]

The Underground Railroad carried thousands of slaves to freedom, but it was no ordinary train. In the face of Constitutional amendments protecting slavery and rancorous debate over whether new states would[more…]

Without Freedom Summer and Selma, it’s doubtful that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would have ever passed. Although black men had received the right to vote with the Fifteenth Amendment and the Nineteenth[more…]

The dramatic civil rights and segregation battles that set the tone for much of the 1960s didn’t just happen. Several events preceded those battles, perhaps none more important than the 1954 Supreme Court[more…]

The Boston Massacre of 1770 helped to start the most important war in U.S. history, the Revolutionary War, and it all started with one man. A runaway slave for more than 20 years, Crispus Attucks instigated[more…]

Emmett Till, a 14-year-old-boy raised on Chicago’s South Side, visited his uncle in Mississippi in August of 1955. The events that occurred during his trip outraged the nation and gave a face to racial[more…]

Under the direction of James Farmer, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an interracial civil rights organization, implemented the influential Freedom Rides of 1961. Organized to test the enforcement[more…]

In the summer of 1964, Mississippi, where countless individuals were boldly murdered without consequence, continued its reign as a segregationist stronghold. Bob Moses, a former SCLC volunteer and a Student[more…]

Some of the most outspoken black antislavery advocates, or abolitionists, were runaway or former slaves. However, African Americans born free also identified with the struggle against slavery. Although[more…]

Very few people doubt that Martin Luther King, Jr., knew that his days were numbered. The fates of other figureheads and leaders in the civil rights movement — particularly the murders of Medgar Evers[more…]

Orchestrated by labor organizer A. Philip Randolph and unsung civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, the March on Washington was held in the nation’s capital on August 28, 1963. More than 250,000 people,[more…]

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 15, 1929, Martin Luther King Jr. originally planned to be a scholar and a minister. King attended Morehouse College and excelled at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester[more…]

African Americans have a long standing tradition of fighting for freedom. This tradition reaches all the way back to the American Revolution. In fact, an African American started the Boston Massacre of[more…]

The Fifteenth Amendment is the last of three amendments introduced in the wake of the Civil War. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment went further and declared that all[more…]